At the bottom of the pasture on the Sartoris place runs a creek that appears in a dozen other fictions, though the role it plays in this story connects it thematically to another creek, the one on the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury where Caddy Compson lies: it's where Narcissa goes to symbolically wash away her shame for having sex with the F.B.I. agent in Memphis. "We sat in the water with our clothes on" is how her son describes the event to Miss Jenny (737); he doesn't know why, but Jenny does - later she facetiously tells Narcissa that the "running water" was apparently her idea of "Jordan at the back of a country pasture" in Mississippi (741).